Telling kids the truth - that abstinence is the most effective way to avoid STDs and/ore pregnancy - doesn't mean that they are being pressured to be abstinent. Unless of course, hard truth equals pressure.
It is all in the presentation, Kathryn. If you will allow me, I will say that you seem to have a privileged environment in the communication aspect. That is great and I see it worked fine for you.
However, let me present a scenario that while hypothetical is IMO all too realistic. I believe I've personally met it, in fact.
A couple has children. For some reason, possibly worry about their future material well-being, they are scared of as much as mentioning the possibility of one of them becoming pregnant (I've met women who never spoke about menstruation with their own mothers).
Such children don't lack only parental support. They are taught to feel fear and shame from actually being people with sex drives, since they realize that their parents feel to embarassed whenever the matter is brought up.
Still, they can't help but fell attracted to people and to sex. So they learn to hide it and to live with feelings of fear, guilt and shame that have little if any justification, but that nevertheless they simply don't know how to get rid of.
That in turn leads to hiding their attempts at understanding what sex is all about, and to even MORE guilt and shame. It is a vicious cycle that feeds upon itself.
Unless enough trust and emmotional support is otherwise established from some outside source, such an environment makes abstinence teachings quite destructive, at least if it is emphasized or somehow presented as being the "true" or "most moral" way to deal with their own sexualities. For that amounts to teaching them that they are defective people that ought to be ashamed of themselves
by principle. They learn to hide their feelings and their doubts, and to feel hopelessly wanting in a way that they are only vaguely aware of.
And all too often, the main (or even only) release for all that bottled anxiety ends up their sexual lives, which they have by this point learned to keep as secret as they can possibly manage to. People actually convince themselves by the truckload that they
must lie to their own parents
for their own good. Sad thing is, that might even be true. But it is certainly destructive, and a major factor in the spread of exactly the kind of problems that abstinence teachings are supposedly expected to avoid.
I would like to know if you think I'm misuderstanding something in this scenario, which is admitedly hypothetical, but that I find to be probably very accurate.